Tale #35 Chicken Parm

Further to Tale #34, where I share the delights of Parm the restaurant, I thought it only appropriate to share my own recipe for chicken parm. This has never actually been written down as anyone who knows what ‘parm’ is knows what is required to make it happen. It’s pretty difficult to mess this up (I say this, but there are people out there who have trouble boiling water and cooking pasta in it, so maybe I shouldn’t assume so much about people’s culinary abilities). This is a good recipe to have up one’s sleeve — it’s easy, relatively inexpensive, filling, and tends to satisfy most normal people. I’m not going to lie — this is not the most attractive dish. I also drown it in cheese so that doesn’t help with the image but what I can say is, what it lacks in photographic beauty it more than makes up for in taste. Perhaps this will encourage British people to get some parm in their lives.

Anyway, this is the first written version of this recipe so here goes:

Ingredients

4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts (you can use mini chicken fillets as well, but it will be more tedious to do the flour-egg-bread crumb dipping process)

approx. 1 cup flour

2 eggs

approx. 1 1/2 cups of breadcrumbs (either seasoned or unseasoned)

2 tablespoons olive oil

jar of marinara sauce if you’re lazy or make your own damn tomato sauce

Shredded mozzarella cheese or sliced fresh mozzarella

Grated parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper for seasoning

Preheat the oven to 375 degree F (approx. 190 degrees C)

Pour the flour into a shallow wide bowl as it will be easier to coat the chicken than if using a deep, narrow bowl. The bowls I have used aren’t ideal as they really should be quite shallow. Whisk the two eggs in a separate bowl, and pour the breadcrumbs in a separate third bowl. (Note: you can mix some parmesan cheese into the breadcrumbs at this stage if you want to go hardcore parm). Line the bowls up next to each other, assembly chain style.

Heat up one tablespoon of the olive oil in a frying pan. You will use the other teaspoon to keep adding oil as the chicken will soak it up as you fry it.

Salt and pepper both sides of each chicken cutlet. Take the chicken cutlets one by one, coat them fully in the flour, then dredge them in the egg mixture, and lastly coat evenly with the bread crumbs and transfer to the frying pan.

Sauté the chicken until the bottoms start turning a darker brown, about 4-7 minutes depending on how crispy you want them. Then flip them over and sauté the other side. Cook until brown and crispy.

Remove the chicken from the pan and place on a paper towel lined plate to soak up the grease.

Spread enough tomato sauce to thickly coat the bottom of a 9×13 casserole pan or baking dish. Arrange the chicken on top of the tomato sauce in the baking dish.

Place a little bit of sauce over each of the cutlets. Top the cutlets with grated parmesan cheese followed by the shredded mozzarella or you can use slices of mozzarella if you prefer.

Bake in the oven for 10-12 minutes, or until the mozzarella begins to brown.

You can serve this with pasta, bread, vegetables (not really the beast’s style though), etc.